I saw this on TV sometime in the mid-70s. Don’t know if it was a theatrical release first. It had something to do with a society dressed in brown and they looked something like pilgrims (at least as they’re portrayed to children). I don’t know if there was a time travel aspect, or if these people just lived off on their own.
What stuck with me was that they practiced stoning, using a large door and big rocks to suffocate transgressors. In one scene they carried out the sentence in broad daylight, in a very solemn manner. Children of the village helped carry rocks.
The protagonist was a blonde, she reminded me of Shirley Jones a la Partridge Family, but it might not have been her. She was an outsider who might have been investigating the group. At the end, she gets squashed.
It’s ringing a very faint bell (though I’d have seen is much later than you did) but I’m coming up blank. How long was this program/movie?
Did a more modern show do an homage to the movie? It seems to me that I saw a show similar to X-Files or the like with an episode with a plot line like that, but I might be mis-remembering and it was the same program you recall as well. Maybe finding the one will help find and name the other?
I saw this movie too when I was a kid! It must have made quite an impression because years later I was under anasthesia for surgery and apparently hallucinated about it and screamed through the entire procedure. I know because they asked me to tell them what was happening (trying to shut me up) and I told them there was a door on top of me and doctors (!) were crushing me to death with stones :eek: . So, don’t let your kids watch this movie. They might upset surgeons later in life.
I knew it was Crowhaven Farm as soon as I read the OP, but I was far too late to bring it up.
You might be interest to know that this method was used to torture, then kill, one of the accusecd witches at Salem, Masachusetts Giles Corey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Corey
It certainly wasn’t the usual method of either execution (the other witches were hung) or of coercing confessions, so its use in the movie (where, If I Recall Correctly, it wasn’t even being used for coercion) was only because it was sufficiently icky to impress little kids. And adults.
Maybe finding the one will help find and name the other?